A delightful menu of citizen science for Thanksgiving

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Dig into this serving of Thanksgiving projects with friends and family. This Thanksgiving, we are thankful for you, our outstanding community of citizen scientists and researchers. Thank you for your efforts, big and small. Happy Thanksgiving. Now, feast on these projects! Cheers! The SciStarter Team This project is for our New England friends. Record sightings of female turkeys and their young to help biologists learn about the impacts of winter storms on turkeys in New Hampshire. Location: ...read more

How Firing Lead At Dust Clumps is Informing Our Theory of Planetary Formation

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

(Left) Picture of the laboratory drop tower. (Right) The expansion of granular clusters from impact. (Credit: Hiroaki Katsuragi and Jürgen Blum) By firing plastic, lead and glass projectiles into clumps of dust, researchers are improving our understanding of how planets form in the universe. Planets start out as loose clumps of dust grains. And, like flour clumps up as you mix it into cake batter, cosmic dust clumps eventually build up to become planets like Earth as gravity pul ...read more

Brain-computer Interface Lets Paralyzed People Control Tablet Devices

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

A patient performs a video search. (Credit: Nuyujukian P, et al. PLoS ONE 13 (11): e0204566.) For the first time, three tetraplegic people are able to control a commercial tablet device with their thoughts thanks to a brain-computer interface. The research suggests that people who lose the capacity to speak may be able continue to communicate with the technology. Mind-controlled Mouse The three study participants are part of a clinical trial to test a brain-computer interface (BCI) called Brai ...read more